Xobni (“inbox” spelled backwards) is a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook. It appears as a sidebar window in Outlook, and it can be opened or hidden. Xobni indexes your e-mail, enabling quick searches of all your correspondence. So far this doesn’t distinguish it from Google Desktop, which also has an Outlook plug-in component for searching e-mail. Where Xobni shines – and, in my view, is controversial, is in providing you with information about the people and institutions with which you’re in e-mail correspondence. Xobni ranks your correspondents based on the frequency of your exchanges with them. You may be surprised to see who your frequent correspondents are. Xobni also tries to extract phone numbers from e-mail messages, presenting them in a way that makes them both prominent and computer dial-able. But here’s the
controversial feature: Xobni shows you the e-mail social network of your correspondents. That is, for each of your correspondents, it presents a list of your correspondent’s contacts! I really don’t know where that information comes from – I guess it comes from data in your e-mail, including people cc:-ed in messages to you. But it feels a bit creepy, and it’s definitely information that you would not have otherwise had easy access to. Xobni takes some deeply buried data and brings it front and center. For some of my contacts, hundreds, even thousands of contacts are listed in e-mail network list. In addition to this social network information, Xobni provides you with lists of conversations you’ve had with a particular correspondent, as well as a list of files you’ve exchanged. Both are handy, and not controversial.
Xobni, like Google Desktop, uses a fair bit of memory and resources, and currently it is only available with Outlook. It also appears to be incompatible with Google Desktop, which will rule it out for many users. This is an application which I can’t figure out whether I love or hate.